Dec 31, 2011 0
Yes, it is the typical tirade
The trouble letting go
No more Melody, or dreams of D
No more Home outside of me
While I cherished what we tried to make
I never got the flow
Ah, heck, I wish I could just turn my back
And leave it all behind
The bad, the good, the dearth of time
The things I couldn’t find
No more masquerades, no fait accompli
No closets with no room for me
The irony in all of this:
While having what is most alike
Myself I could but miss
Dec 27, 2011 0
Christmas is the one time of the year where I get to see family, where all siblings are back home at the same time. That is what Christmas is for me: family time.
Dec 24, 2011 0
I recently shared a bunch of ideas on how to make gift wrapping out of trash. I wrapped another set of gifts today. While the first set was made of trash I found in my apartment in Oslo, I had to find stuff around my parents’ house this time round.
One thing to look for is shopping bags. Some stores have bags with awesome designs, and they work really well for gift wrapping.
The paper bag of the local supermarket reads “Everything is going to be alright.” Isn’t that perfect for gifts? All I had to do was add some details: some birds, and the gift card as dot on the i.
For this gift I used a plastic shopping bag. The blue handle worked surprisingly well as decoration.
I have tons of reinforcement rings that I haven’t used for ages. Well, until today, that is. I used them to make a hole-y tree 
The ribbon is made of the material that the rings came on. No waste at all!
A CD wrapped in CDs, is that possible? I say yes! Cutting CDs is a bit messy though, I added tape around the edges to prevent additional mess. For this particular wrapping, I used old Knoppix 5 and Kubuntu 6 installer CDs. I will not miss them.
I also found a piece of a shirt that I had cut up for another project. The leftover I found was the bit around the shoulder. The seam there makes a nice line in the final wrapping. I added color with a stitched star and the stitches around the edges. I tried backstitch for the bottom edge, but I changed to straight stitch for the other two edges. It made the wrapping easy to open, and the reverse side looked much nicer.
So far, I had used paper and plastic trash, but I hadn’t used food scraps yet. I decided that tangerine zest and and nutshells where both available without end and perfect for the season. And they look nice, don’t they?
For the last gift I didn’t experiment much with new materials. Well, I hadn’t used paper towels before (and no, I didn’t take those out if the trash – I used new ones). But this gift isn’t really about the materials; it is about the looks. It’s a double-cream hazelnut cake with a whole bunch of cream topping. Yum! 
Dec 24, 2011 1
Almost a month ago I posted about my white-board Advent calendar project, the Creepy Creature Calendar. Thanks to Claudio I know that this technique is called exquisite corpse (check out this exquisite book!).
24 days later the calendar is all filled out, thanks to my colleagues at work. It was a fun experience, and I think this has potential to become a tradition. The creature has lots of eyes, a bunch of heads and feet, and there is a bird. Also, the creature is (at least partly) female, and she is exploited for her milk.
Here is an animation of how she came into being:
I started taking a picture every day, but my phone got stolen, so I had to create this progress animation from the last photograph.
Here are pictures of some of the creepy creature’s features:
The cross-eyed siamese teddy bear.
Swinging udder.
Arms and legs and… the creature is reset to 0. Or something
The peaceful bird, scratching into the heart-adorned arm.
Mr. Floating Pumkin, and Mr. Angry Meat-Eating Plant.
“I’m in the middle but nobody likes me”-dude.
Eye-tongued trident-armed dragon head, aiming to kill that bug.
Thanks to the following people who participated in this fun little project:
Dec 22, 2011 0
Update: I posted a part two now.
The other night I wrapped some gifts for loved ones. I’m not the wrapping paper kind of person though. When it comes to wrapping gifts, I want to recycle as much as possible. But I still want gifts that look nice! So, most of the materials I used I took from the paper trash. For books, I often used parts of the packaging they were shipped in. Here are some detailed shots of the gifts:
For the first gift I used the original packaging and painted it with acrylic paint. I like the purple (front) side much better than the back.
Here I also used original packaging, added stripes of old printouts and a picture I found in an old magazine. Then I added some gold paint to make it look a little fancier.
Here I cut up a toilet paper roll as decoration.
I wrapped one gift in a magazine ad. The ad was about organic products (not all vegan, unfortunately). The card is a piece of a pasta carton. I put it all together with rubber bands.
Old bags from a local deli and a bit of string make nice gift wrapping, too. The card is made from a piece of a tea box.
And last but not least: bits of cardboard make Tetris-style gift wrapping (card included).
Dec 17, 2011 0
On a night out, many months ago
A stranger gave me a rose
On the dance floor, the inconvenient rose
Was passed on to me. Although:The rose was not the usual kind
Yes, after few days, it sunk its head.
Its blossom went all dry and dead.The leaves, though, had their own mind.
They stayed alive, day after day
And new leaves grew and followed their way.The rose is still with me
Alive, without a head
Without its roots, but doubtless instead
Full of life.
Dec 12, 2011 0
This is my favorite creamy dressing at the moment, I thought I could share it:
50g almonds
juice of half a lemon
ca. 100ml water
2 heaped tablespoons nutritional yeast
1-2 teaspoons amchur powder
salt (maybe half a teaspoon?)
a bit of pepper
First blend the almonds, then add the rest of the ingredients and blend until smooth.
I ate it with massaged raw kale salad today.
For that, I cut kale leaves off the stems and tore them up in pieces. Then I added salt and a bit of olive oil, and massaged that in for 1-2 minutes. Then I added the almond dressing. Done!
Dec 5, 2011 2
(Watch this post in Opera 11.60.)
Yes, Opera can draw double rainbows out-of-the-box (Double rainbow, all the way!!!1!). It’s only the second easter egg after the slashdot one that I know about. /me likes
Dec 1, 2011 0
If you have followed this blog the last few days, you might have noticed my modest excitement for Advent-y stuff. Now, I wanted to have a physical, potentially collaborative, Advent calendar at work (in addition to the other Advent stuff I set up). So I made one on the whiteboard this morning:
Each day until Christmas, someone can continue drawing parts of the creature(s). Today it got an additional set of eyes
